It’s not nice to fool Mother Justice
So, if you’re a rogue agency (or entire administration) within the government of the United States, arguably a nation of laws and not men, how do you go about keeping videotape evidence of unlawful torture away from the courts? Here’s a clever idea:
(AP) CIA Destroyed Tapes Despite Court Order
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Bush administration was under court order not to discard evidence of detainee torture and abuse months before the CIA destroyed videotapes that revealed some of its harshest interrogation tactics.
Normally, that would force the government to defend itself against obstruction allegations. But the CIA may have an out: its clandestine network of overseas prisons.
While judges focused on the detention center in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and tried to guarantee that any evidence of detainee abuse would be preserved, the CIA was performing its toughest questioning half a world away. And by the time President Bush publicly acknowledged the secret prison system, interrogation videotapes of two terrorism suspects had been destroyed.
The CIA destroyed the tapes in November 2005. That June, U.S. District Judge Henry H. Kennedy Jr. had ordered the Bush administration to safeguard “all evidence and information regarding the torture, mistreatment, and abuse of detainees now at the United States Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay.”
Cute gimmick, huh? Too cute. Way too cute.
You can take my word for it as a trial lawyer — judges — even ultraconservative judges — don’t like it when litigants screw with them. It’s always a bad idea to lie to a judge, especially if you’re eventually going to get caught doing it. But it may be an even worse idea to try to come up with a clever dodge that allows you to lie to the judge (or flaunt his or her rulings) in substance, while leaving yourself a disingenuous loophole.
To borrow from the old margarine commercial, it’s not nice to fool Mother Justice.
If Bush & Co. are smart they won’t even try this tack (it wouldn’t work anyway, the court would probably just deem the destruction of the tapes to be an obstruction of justice regardless of any order): instead, they’ll blame the destruction on a miscommunication, a rogue agent or administrator or something of the sort. Because if they really do try to make this type of hypertechnical excuse fly in court (“Gosh, Judge, these guys weren’t even in Cuba where you thought they were and where your order applied, because we had secretly hidden them somewhere else”), they’ll throw away whatever little remaining credibility they have in the federal courts.
Even the likes of Roberts and Alito won’t take that lying down. It will haunt the administration in case after case for the rest of Bush’s term and perhaps beyond.
In any case, we’ll find out soon enough how the administration plans to play this, since the ACLU is already moving to have the CIA held in contempt.
Interesting times, these. Interesting times, indeed.
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December 12th, 2007 at 10:09 pm
What’s nice got to do with it?
December 13th, 2007 at 1:41 am
Can they stall and refuse to testify or give evidence?
I mean won’t they make this go away too? Like Valerie Plame? Like Abu Ghraib? Like Walter Reed? Like Curveball and Libby? I could go on but you get the picture.
If a bush administration commits a crime and there’s no media around to report it……is it a crime?
December 13th, 2007 at 3:14 am
Dear Steve, You have more faith in Roberts and Alito than I do. Of course, if they look at all of Bush’s behavior since he was handed the 2000 election by their peers, they should be able to ascertain that George W. Bush does not feel he needs to give any regard whatsoever to the letter of the law, the Constitution, the Congress, and certainly not the wishes of the majority of the people of the United States. If they take his behavior and apply it to a logical conclusion, they will see that they are superfluous. All Hail Bush the Almighty Dictator! He has given the finger to the law and sees no purpose in abiding by it. The Supreme Court can take a hike as far as he is concerned. Bush is a man who has gotten away with murder. He believes himself to be infallible and beyond the law.
December 14th, 2007 at 1:58 am
alwayshope
Schrödinger’s cat…
it’s all about observation and memory - if you cannot look at the cat without risking to kill the cat, so how do you know that the cat is still alive? And if you looked and the cat is dead how do you know that it wasn’t you who killed the cat?
no, i don’t believe in mixed states (only in undetermined action chains, that’s a difference), but problem is that our brains cannot work with the “real reality”, brains only work with representations - that’s why so many people confuse the world inside their heads with reality and therefore think, that “the truth” doesn’t exist, because it is per se impossible to catch the whole reality in a representation, so we all work with small parts, each and every of us with a little different part of reality - but that’s not a thing of reality, that’s a thing of how our brains have to do it
but despite the fact that nearly no one knows what information is - alpha dogs know this very well, that’s why all the totalitarian systems, all kings and popes try to control the flood of information
they simply want to “make the reality for you” - and that simply is to control how the foundation of your decisions looks like - and that simply is to control your decisions
because, yes, alwayshope
as long as you don’t know something - it doesn’t exist…
for you
and there is only one chance for you to “catch a little more reality” for better decisions (better in your favor, not in their): you have to consider the impact of the “reality makers”
how?
Cui Bono - or in the modern language of Deep Throat: Follow the Money